Often, electronic commerce services provide users with browsing and purchase histories, enabling those users to view items (e.g., goods and/or services) that the users have previously browsed and purchased. While the histories may be complete and detailed, they are bereft of context, such as events going on in the users' life which may have led to the browsing or purchase activities.
Also, these services make use of the histories themselves, matching activities and patterns found in the histories with those of other users who then purchased some item or service in order to recommend that item or service to the user(s) associated with the activities or patterns. For example, one user may have browsed a first book and, the next day, bought a second book. The service may utilize the histories to identify users who recently browsed the first book and may recommend the second book to those users. Typically, the services look for activities or patterns that are fairly recent, as activities occurring further in the past, without any additional context or information, may be less indicative of a user's current interests.